Failed Cultural Narratives: America in the Postwar Era and the Story of Democracy

Borders and bodies are increasingly regulated by data-capturing mechanisms spread across the world through information and communication technologies. This article traces the features and implications of such a border-body datalogical entanglement through the figure of the drug mule. It analyzes government documents and recorded case studies to argue that this figure emerges from an assemblage of cultural narratives, legal structures, human labor, technical practices, and biological processes. The datalogical drug mule is already implicated in a struggle over what, and how, data is meaningful and actionable. Investigating this figure allows us to begin disentangling the data-driven mechanisms that constitute modern borders and bodies while at the same time accounting for analog continuities in contemporary practices of border security.

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Chopin and His World

10.23943/princeton/9780691177755.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Keyword(s):

Franz Liszt ◽

Cultural Narratives ◽

Artistic Representations ◽

First Time

Fryderyk Chopin (1810–1849), although the most beloved of piano composers, remains a contradictory figure, an artist of virtually universal appeal who preferred the company of only a few sympathetic friends and listeners. This book reexamines Chopin and his music in light of the cultural narratives formed during his lifetime. These include the romanticism of the ailing spirit, tragically singing its death-song as life ebbs; the Polish expatriate, helpless witness to the martyrdom of his beloved homeland, exiled among friendly but uncomprehending strangers; the sorcerer-bard of dream, memory, and Gothic terror; and the pianist's pianist, shunning the appreciative crowds yet composing and improvising idealized operas, scenes, dances, and narratives in the shadow of virtuoso-idol Franz Liszt. The chapters demonstrate the ways in which Chopin responded to and was understood to exemplify these narratives, as an artist of his own time and one who transcended it. The book offers recently rediscovered artistic representations of his hands (with analysis), and—for the first time in English—an extended tribute to Chopin published in Poland upon his death and contemporary Polish writings contextualizing Chopin's compositional strategies.

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White Writers, Race Matters

10.1093/oso/9780190687229.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Gregory S. Jay

Keyword(s):

Literary History ◽

Historical Analysis ◽

Cultural Work ◽

Cultural Narratives ◽

Literary Forms ◽

The Social ◽

White Writers ◽

American Literary History ◽

Taking Action

White liberal race fiction has been an enduringly popular genre in American literary history. It includes widely read and taught works such as Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird along with period bestsellers now sometimes forgotten. Hollywood regularly adapted them into blockbusters, reinforcing their cultural influence. These novels and films protest slavery, confront stereotypes, dramatize social and legal injustices, engage the political controversies of their time, and try to move readers emotionally toward taking action. The literary forms and arguments of these books derive from the cultural work they intend to do in educating the minds and hearts, and propelling the actions, of those who think they are white—indeed, in making the social construction of that whiteness readable and thus more susceptible of reform. The white writers of these fictions struggle with their own place in systems of oppression and privilege while asking their readers to do the same. The predominance of women among this tradition’s authors leads to exploring how their critiques of gender and race norms often reinforced each other. Each chapter provides a case study combining biography, historical analysis, close reading, and literary theory to map the significance of this genre and its ongoing relevance. This tradition remains vital because every generation must relearn the lessons of antiracism and formulate effective cultural narratives for passing on the intellectual and emotional tools useful in fighting injustice.

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A Long, Long Way

10.1093/oso/9780190906252.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Greg Garrett

Keyword(s):

People Of Color ◽

Racial Reconciliation ◽

Cultural Narratives ◽

Truth Telling ◽

Religious Traditions ◽

The Past ◽

Hollywood Films ◽

The World ◽

History Of ◽

Race And Culture

Hollywood films are perhaps the most powerful storytellers in American history, and their depiction of race and culture has helped to shape the way people around the world respond to race and prejudice. Over the past one hundred years, films have moved from the radically prejudiced views of people of color to the depiction of people of color by writers and filmmakers from within those cultures. In the process, we begin to see how films have depicted negative versions of people outside the white mainstream, and how film might become a vehicle for racial reconciliation. Religious traditions offer powerful correctives to our cultural narratives, and this work incorporates both narrative truth-telling and religious truth-telling as we consider race and film and work toward reconciliation. By exploring the hundred-year period from The Birth of a Nation to Get Out, this work acknowledges the racist history of America and offers the possibility of hope for the future.

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Studying Globalization at Home

10.1093/oso/9780199964727.003.0009 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Sunil Bhatia

Keyword(s):

Qualitative Research ◽

Lived Experience ◽

Participant Observation ◽

Cultural Narratives ◽

Cultural Codes ◽

Qualitative Approaches ◽

Interpretive Methods ◽

Significant Interest ◽

At Home

This chapter documents the ethnographic context in which the interviews and participant observation were conducted for the study presented in this book. It also situates the study within the context of narrative inquiry and develops arguments about the role of self-reflexivity in doing ethnography at “home” and producing qualitative forms of knowledge that are based on personal, experiential, and cultural narratives. It is argued that there is significant interest in the adoption of interpretive methods or qualitative research in psychology. The qualitative approaches in psychology present a provocative and complex vision of how the key concepts related to describing and interpreting cultural codes, social practices, and lived experience of others are suffused with both poetical and political elements of culture. The epistemological and ontological assumptions undergirding qualitative research reflect multiple “practices of inquiry” and methodologies that have different orientations, assumptions, values, ideologies, and criterion of excellence.

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Metaphors and cultural narratives on adaptive responses to severe adversity: A field study among the Indigenous Pitaguary community in Brazil

Transcultural Psychiatry ◽

10.1177/1363461519890435 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 57 (2) ◽

pp. 332-345 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Iara Meili ◽

Eva Heim ◽

Ana C Pelosi ◽

Andreas Maercker

Keyword(s):

Posttraumatic Growth ◽

Field Study ◽

Cultural Context ◽

Field Research ◽

Adaptive Responses ◽

Cultural Narratives ◽

Structured Interviews ◽

The Core ◽

Recovery Processes ◽

Context Specific

The expressions resilience and posttraumatic growth represent metaphorical concepts that are typically found in Euro-American contexts. Metaphors of severe adversity or trauma and the expressions of overcoming it vary across cultures—a lacuna, which has not been given much attention in the literature so far. This study aimed to explore the metaphorical concepts that the Indigenous Pitaguary community in Brazil uses to talk about adaptive and positive responses to severe adversity and to relate them to their socio-cultural context. We carried out 14 semi-structured interviews during field research over a one-month period of fieldwork. The data were explored with systematic metaphor analysis. The core metaphors included images of battle, unity, spirituality, journeys, balance, time, sight, transformation, and development. These metaphors were related to context-specific cultural narratives that underlie the Pitaguary ontological perspective on collectivity, nature, and cosmology. The results suggest that metaphors and cultural narratives can reveal important aspects of a culture’s collective mindset. To have a contextualized understanding of expressive nuances is an essential asset to adapt interventions to specific cultures and promote culture-specific healing and recovery processes.

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Sexual Violence and Mental Health: An Analysis of the Mediating Role of Self-Compassion Using a Feminist Lens

Violence Against Women ◽

10.1177/10778012211012097 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 107780122110120

Author(s):

Paige McAllister ◽

Amber Vennum

Keyword(s):

Mental Health ◽

Sexual Violence ◽

Cultural Narratives ◽

Self Blame ◽

Mediating Role ◽

Undergraduate Women ◽

Self Compassion ◽

Feminist Theories ◽

Anxiety Depression

Feminist theories describe how women who experience sexual violence often internalize cultural narratives which can lead to self-blame and disconnection. Self-compassion has the potential to provide a buffer against these negative outcomes. This study explored self-compassion as a mediator of the association between experiencing sexual violence and negative mental health outcomes. The sample consisted of 368 undergraduate women. A path analysis revealed that experiencing sexual violence prior to the beginning of the semester was positively associated with self-criticism, anxiety, depression, and PTSD symptoms at the end of the semester directly and indirectly through self-compassion mid-semester. Clinical and research implications are also discussed.

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Narrative Continuity/Rupture: Projected Professional Futures amid Pervasive Employment Precarity

Work and Occupations ◽

10.1177/07308884211028277 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 073088842110282

Author(s):

Elena Ayala-Hurtado

Keyword(s):

Working Conditions ◽

Lived Experiences ◽

Institutional Support ◽

University Graduates ◽

Cultural Narratives ◽

Future Projections ◽

Cultural Narrative ◽

The Past ◽

Stable Employment ◽

Past Conditions

As working conditions change worldwide, employment precarity is increasing, including for groups for whom such conditions are unexpected. This study investigates how members of one such group—educationally advantaged young adults—describe their professional futures in a context of unprecedented employment precarity where their expected trajectories are no longer easily achievable. Using 75 interviews with young university graduates in Madrid, Spain, I find that most young graduates drew on a long-standing cultural narrative, which I call the “achievement narrative,” to imagine future stable employment. Simultaneously, most denounced this narrative as fraudulent. To explain this finding, I draw on the concept of hysteresis: the mismatch between beliefs that are dependent on the past conditions that produced them and the available opportunities in the present. I argue that hysteresis can extend into future projections; projected futures can be guided by beliefs based on past conditions more than by lived experiences in the present. Further, I argue that the achievement narrative itself reinforces hysteresis in future projections due to its resonance and institutional support. The paper offers new insights into projected futures and employment precarity by analyzing the future projections of a privileged cohort facing unexpected precarity, further develops the concept of hysteresis, and extends the study of cultural narratives.

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